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New Eden in New England

By MADELINE DREXLER;

Published: July 14, 1991

"IT is very remotely placed, without a road, surrounded by a beautiful green landscape of fields and woods, with the distance filled up with some of the loftiest mountains in the State." So wrote a correspondent to Henry David Thoreau, describing the utopian community Fruitlands in Harvard, Mass.

The town of Harvard -- 30 miles west of Boston -- is still on the way to nowhere, with just a few rural highways lacing through serene woods and pastures. One feels perfectly safe ambling down the middle of its back roads, the encircling hills shutting out the noise of the world. Up on Prospect Hill, looking west across the Nashua River valley, the blue shapes of Wachusett, Watatic and faraway Monadnock shift color with the passing hours.

For present-day contemplatives, or for those who simply love the New England countryside, this is a good year for taking a day trip to Harvard. The short-lived Fruitlands, now a collection of small museums, displays treasures from 19th-century transcendentalism and other mystical movements. And because 1991 is the 200th anniversary of an important Shaker community in Harvard, Fruitlands is also offering two Shaker exhibitions.

One describes the sect's lively commerce with the world, and includes artifacts ranging from large brown glass jugs that held peach water for urban bakeries to a splendid cobbler's bench that seems to owe as much to Louise Nevelson as to Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers in America; it will be on display for two years, until the end of the 1992 Fruitlands season. The other exhibit, titled "Harvard Collects Shaker," features Shaker furniture from private collections in the Northeast, and can be viewed through mid-October. On Saturday, July 20, Fruitlands has a symposium of new research on the Harvard Shakers; the public is invited.

Both Fruitlands and Shakerism exemplified the optimism and ferment of 19th-century America. By the mid-1840's, according to some estimates, nearly 100 model societies had sprung up around the country, offering various dilutions of socialism, asceticism and millennialism. The era spawned not only the abolition and temperance movements but also phrenology, mesmerism and cold water cures.

The Shakers grew in a soil of rural pietistic revivals. Mother Ann, the illiterate, English-born founder of the church, preached that the Millennium was already here. The religion attracted converts -- and obtained orphans -- by offering a life that was clean, orderly and materially comfortable.

By contrast, transcendentalism -- or the Newness, as it was dubbed -- grew out of European Romanticism. It was based on the notions that humans have an innate intelligence that transcends what we know through sensory experience, and that dogma and convention shackle the mind. Beyond that, transcendentalism seemed to mean something different to each person who embraced it. For Bronson Alcott, the New England educator and philospher, and a leader of the small Fruitlands group, it meant there was a spiritual connection between all living things. No creature, he believed, should enslave another.

In 1843, the red Fruitlands farmhouse -- deteriorating even then -- nestled on a splendid Harvard hillside. The helmsmen of the group were Alcott and Charles Lane, a grim English reformer and mystic. They brought Alcott's family (including his 10-year-old daughter, Louisa May) and a few sympathetic colleagues. In this "New Eden," the gentlemen farmers forbade animal products for any purposes. Only fruits, vegetables and nuts graced the table; only linen clothing was worn (cotton being a product of slave labor). Through hard work and constant intellectural inquiry, they aimed for spiritual purity. But as Louisa May Alcott wrote in a satirical memoir titled "Transcendental Wild Oats," "the brethren, who were so busy discussing and defining great duties . . . forgot to perform the small ones." As agriculturalists, they were pathetic: planting fruit trees in the wrong places, churning up good root crops for fertilizer, neglecting the harvest in favor of the lecture circuit.

That Fruitlands survives at all is due not to Alcott's group but to a Boston blueblood named Clara Endicott Sears. A woman of fierce intellectual interests, she was bored with the moneyed routine of benefits and luncheons. In 1910, she built a summer estate on Prospect Hill -- and discovered that the rickety eyesore spoiling her view was the old Fruitlands farmhouse. That launched her career as a preservationist, tracking down letters, documents, diaries, furniture and descendants of the transcendental pioneers.

Besides restoring Fruitlands, Clara Sears also created on the same grounds an Indian museum, a 19th-century picture gallery and a Shaker museum. The Shaker Museum -- the first in this country, opened in 1922 -- is a 1794 Shaker-built house, moved from the Harvard village four miles away and re-arranged inside to display domestic and work-related crafts.

To capture the ambiance of Fruitlands, one might start in the old farmhouse. A musty scent fills each room, perhaps coming from the warped, wide pine floorboards or the original posts and beams, perhaps from the motley array of period furniture, mouldering books, and brown-stained letters. The collection Clara Sears established runs from odd to marvelous, and is not limited to Fruitlands residents. In the Philosopher's Room, a dining and discussion area just off the front hall, are a cherry sideboard, a framed original letter by Emerson, and a set of black-and-white English lusterware that Louisa May played with as a child.